I was fully locked-in to the ecosystem, the phone, the services, the TV, and I am looking for the exits.
I’m starting to parallelize to software which will play well on Linux, and when I’m feeling ready (or miserable enough) I will not be looking back.
The macOS exodus will be like Hemingway’s line about bankruptcy: very slowly and then all at once.
Yesterday, my wife wanted to use Discord. It was right there in the applications folder. But MacOS couldn't find it. Launching it manually took minutes, for some reason.
We wanted to download a clip using yt_dlp (a Python program). Terminal told us, this would require dev tools, which it doesn't. So we installed Python from python.org instead, which worked. Except, that non-blessed python could not access the internet because of some MacOS "security" feature.
Another security feature requires all apps to be notarized, even the ones I built myself. This used to have a relatively easy workaround (right click, open, accept the risk). Now it needs a terminal command.
I live and work in a multi-lingual environment, and have set up a keyboard shortcut to switch between the German and English keyboard. MacOS does not have a keyboard shortcut for this. But Karabiner can do it, albeit a bit jankily.
Lately, the keyboard layout no longer sticks. It resets to English when I press shift. Sometimes it does work, sometimes it doesn't. This is unrelated to the aforementioned Karabiner shortcut.
The German keyboard layout for MacOS on non-Apple keyboards is insane. So I made my own layout. This is relatively easy, and worked well. Except, every single OS update reinstates Apple's insane layout.
Sometimes my Mac does not wake from sleep. Pressing the power button does nothing. Hitting keyboard keys does nothing. Only a long-press of the power button eventually reboots it. The power button on the Mac Studio is in an insane place of course.
There is still no indication anywhere that the hard drive is getting full.
There is still no simple way to reset the computer to factory conditions.
Gaming is still largely impossible, even though the hardware is very capable.
I have replaced TimeMachine with restic, as TimeMachine keeps resetting itself after a while.
My Linux PC should arrive this week, and will replace the Mac. I've had enough.
It will require wine for two apps, and a VM for two others. At this point, that's a price I'm willing to pay.
All the _just works_ feeling and reliability seem to be gone. Tahoe is so unstable that I now restart the Mac every day, when in the past it happened on software updates only. Apple Music is another huge mess, I can’t comprehend how can it be so unreliable.
Looking for exits as well and kind of looking forward to migrating to Graphene OS, self-hosted Immich, and Navidrome
It shouldn't have been broken though. It shouldn't be a native app written by Apple that feels worse to use than both Spotify and YouTube music. I mean, I open it now just to see if there's anything janky and yeah. "Get 3 months for $5.99" and then below that "Get 3 months for $8.99" and you'd have to scroll and read much smaller text to see that the second one is for family - I mean that's reasonably obvious but it's weirdly unpolished. And then the play bar, which is floating around, looks unintegrated with the app, obscures the content area, and provides enabled controls that do nothing because there is no song to play. Not broken, but UX stuff that shows a lack of care.
They managed to mess up an entire ecosystem and they’re acting so stupid about it that I cannot believe all this software was made by Apple.
There’s no elegance, no thought out user experience, no good design, it’s all stupid glass design with comical amount of padding. It all looks like it was designed and implemented by a team five over a half assed pool party.
What the hell is Apple doing with its tens of thousands of engineers, if they cannot make a freaking window manager.
Take your favourite rock band and turn over all the musicians until no one is left from the original band. Should we expect the band to continue cranking out chart-topping hits?
There's one further factor that makes the situation even worse than the "Rock Band of Theseus." That's the fact that young software engineers are not interested in stewardship. They want to build their own projects, not fix bugs in someone else's. Across the software industry we see this lead to a continual churn, rewrites and redesigns no one wants, and a huge amount of wasted effort reinventing the wheel (and often making a worse wheel).
However bad you think Apple is getting with MacOS - windows is getting worse. And Linux ? Good luck getting decent hardware that will run without having basic functionality issues. Queue the linux brigade "my PC works perfect, what linux issues are you having". Meanwhile I can't use bluetooth on my desktop (works perfectly fine on windows), and I was watching laptop reviews from justjosh recently where he's adding a segment where he is trying out linux on the device - and his experience on the two videos I've seen "sound does't work, wifi doesn't work, BT doesn't work ..."
All that said I am looking into leaving the Apple ecosystem as well because I just don't like how locked down and the devices are, but I'm fully aware that it's going to take significant effort for stuff that I'd get out of the box from Apple.
You can anticipate "the linux brigade" because it works well for many of us.
This isn't to say there _aren't_ problems. Bluetooth, audio, etc. working all depend on having the luck that someone wrote good drivers for the device you want to install Linux on. When you do have a problem, you don't have the benefit of having many people on your same configuration like you do with Apple. You might find yourself troubleshooting as the only person with your specific combo of dongle, mobo, cpu, distro, and kernel.
I've been on Linux since 2009 and MacOS since 2021. I've never had a bluetooth problem with Linux but I've had a ton on MacOS (but that might just be airpods).
The nice thing about Linux is that you have control over all your problems. On MacOS, if you have a solvable problem, the solution is often either "Pray that Apple fixes it in the next release" or "The fix for that costs $10 per month and it'll clog up your app switcher". On Linux, if you have a solvable problem, the solution is often "go into the settings for your distribution" or "install this tweak tool" or "find someone who had it before on a support forum and follow their steps".
It's not unreasonable that someone who is fed up with unsolvable problems on MacOS would find Linux more appealing. It's not a naive mindset, it's just how things are.
The big idea with Linux/BSD/fully-open-source is that you can fix whatever you don't like.
That was the breaking point for me with Tahoe. I never loved MacOS before that, but it never got in the way. Then with Tahoe, it got in the way, so I went to fix it, and found out that fixing it is actually impossible! That was the breakup moment.
Sophisticated LLMs make it even easier to fix or tweak any Linux/BSD/fully-open-source software to our liking.
That's a great theory, and sometimes it's actually true, but in reality for most users most of the time, Linux is as "fixable" as Windows or macOS, because most people, even the technically savvy ones aren't driver developers. Heck most software developers probably aren't even C programmers anymore. And even if someone had the competency in the language and low level system programming, do they have the time and the inclination to re-write the audio stack so that it finally works correctly? Or to fix the fact that even in 2026, sleep and hibernate are hit and miss? And then to maintain their patch against future system updates or go through the process of getting it upstreamed?
Most Linux users, and especially most Linux users switching from something like macOS or Windows would be waiting and hoping that someone else decided to fix the thing for them because they either lack the skills, time or inclination to do it themselves. And we know this is true because if it weren't true, all the various "wars" over the years like systemd and pulse audio and wayland wouldn't have been a war at all because everyone who didn't like it would have easily patched it out and moved on. But a modern full fledged OS experience is a mess of intertwined and complex dependencies. So when a distro decides to switch a big chunk of the underlying stack like that, most people either have to go along with it, or hope that enough people feel strongly enough about it to fork everything and make their own distro, and then they have to hope the forkers have the passion and drive to maintain that for them.
Yes, you "can" fix whatever you don't like in linux. Just like you "can" find all the information you need to diagnose and treat whatever medical condition you might have online and at your local libraries. But most people are still going to pay a doctor, because most people don't have the time or skills to actually do it.
I disagree with this. For most users, most of the time, Linux is significantly more fixable than Windows or MacOS.
In nearly 20 years, I've never had to write a line of C or touch the Linux kernel to fix issues I've had on Linux.
For example, one of my big peeves I've had lately on both PopOS and MacOS are the looooong animations to switch desktops.
On PopOS, I had two paths to fix this: Tweak the COSMIC desktop to fix the behavior, or the simple thing of simply installing GNOME (or KDE or any other DE of choice).
On MacOS, I'm SOL. There's no way to fix that on my Macbook (short of installing Asahi Linux, of course).
> Just like you "can" find all the information you need to diagnose and treat whatever medical condition you might have online and at your local libraries. But most people are still going to pay a doctor, because most people don't have the time or skills to actually do it.
This isn't a great analogy, but it's worth noting: Many conditions are expected to be self-diagnosed and self-treated. I don't go to the doctor for scrapes, bruises, colds, dry eyes, a stubbed toe, etc. By this analogy, Linux users are buying their own aspirin and applying their own band-aids, while MacOS users are waiting in line, dependent on someone else to fix these things.
I say this as someone who uses both MacOS and Linux daily.
There are often comments on threads like this that go along the lines of "If only the people making Linux desktop did X then they'd get more people". But there there isn't really anyone making Linux on the desktop. It's not a product. Even the products within it are built on the work of people with very disparate interests. It's kind of amazing that we get a cobbled together working experience at all.
Apple and Microsoft can focus on particular things, like getting more users, or supporting hardware they want to sell, or trying to get you to sign up to Office 365. No Linux desktop environment can have that kind of focus. So when you say it's not fixable to most users I think: well it's not supposed to be. It's not supposed to be anything, it just kind of is. Like coming across a mountain instead of a theme park - it's not a curated experience, it's not going to be for everyone, you might get hurt, but it's far far more beautiful.
The first of these systems is actionable: When it doesn't work, it can generally be made to work. The whole journey may be an awful affair for the entire duration, but a person can usually (not always!) get there.
The other two systems are inactionable: When it doesn't work, there is no fixing it. There is no pathway, nor any journey. One can only accept that it is broken, that they are powerless to change it, and that this is the end of the road for that problem.
---
There are probably healthier ways to learn acceptance than this.
I have come to hate Android, but every time I seriously look at switching to iOS, it seems Apple has chosen that time to make things even worse. Unfortunately, there's no Linux equivalent for phones. (Or at least, nothing that's easier than gentoo was in 2004. That was great for learning, but for daily use of a critical device, not so great.)
It's also important to mention that it is more likely a person would get help along the way.
And - it should also be said that there are non-Linux free operating systems, like the BSD's, for which it can also "generally be made to work". And there's the more niche HaikuOS (where I don't know if what doesn't work can be made to work, but people do use it).
I think you and GP agree more than you realise, their point seems to be that Apple was worth all the locked down walled garden stuff because at least it "just worked." Now it's a locked down walled garden which _also doesn't work._ Tahoe and iOS 26 are the worst of both worlds.
Ok, you're having Bluetooth issues. Fair enough. But using Bluetooth (on a desktop no less) is not so overwhelmingly common that one can justify a sweeping statement like yours on that basis. The "Linux brigade" says that stuff works for them because it does. My desktop "just works" for me and it has for like 5 years at this point. That doesn't mean everything is perfect, but neither is Linux the train wreck of incompatibility you describe.
I think that's probably a few years out of date. Certainly, it used to be completely true and was a major problem.
I'm just not finding that now. Drivers are better, and more widespread, and there are less odd hardware innovations in standard PC components that screw it up.
And, if you want a laptop that runs Linux perfectly, there are more than a few options out there that ship with Linux installed and supported now.
Your experience isn't uncommon, but it's largely the result of trying to force a square peg into a round hole. There are thousands of different smartphones, game consoles and set-top boxes that rely on Linux for all of their basic functionality. You only get problems trying to smash reverse-engineered drivers and hardware together expecting OEM-level support. If you want good Linux support, pay for good Linux support.
ElementaryOS is supposed to be a very clean transition environment for mac refugees. AI makes everything so much easier, Windows and Mac both have far more friction and hassle in contrast. Good luck!
When someone (Google?) finds me a way to seamlessly find/lock my phone from my computer, my computer from phone, and they all find my wife phone and computer, and they all find my keys and my wife keys... that will be the day I escape.
And... it's fine? Am I only using the happy path? Or are people just particularly confident about complaining about Tahoe after seeing everyone else do it.
For sure it has glitches, but as far as I can tell, they're the same glitches that were in Sequoia. (If anyone at Apple is reading this, can you take a glance at your NFS client code? It does like to just hang up occasionally.)
The only major complaint I have is the window resize target, which seems not to line up properly with the actual window corner, since they gave them Very Rounded Corners.
It's also a bit weird that the radius of the VRCs seems to change app to app.
But these are nits. I work on Tahoe every day and it seems fine.
I have two M4 Pro's w/ 24GB of RAM (one work, one personal). Work is on Tahoe, personal on sequoia and there's a really noticeable difference in overall UI responsiveness. It becomes even more pronounced when I hook up to my external display (32" 4k).
In a way it reminds me of the olden days of running KDE or Compiz with every fancy effect enabled but on an underpowered GPU. Yeah, it technically works, but it's not necessarily a fluid or enjoyable experience.
I have my own other nitpicks about liquid glass & the design (there's tons of papercuts here), but that doesn't necessarily impact stability.
In my experience, the OS is as good as it's ever been. I've had to restart a Tahoe machine for something other than updates maybe once with macOS 26, and my main workstation is used 12+ hours/day.
In the HN Extended Universe, everyone using macOS has perpetually Had Enough and "begun to switch to Linux", while in the real world, Apple shipped 10%+ more Macs in 2025 than they did in 2024.
Windows seems like windows. I don't care. I'll keep updating to the latest so long as MS wants to give me free updates. My Mac desktop changes looks a bit on each new release but otherwise it's all entirely unremarkable. Maintaining my linux boxes is a little more involved, which is fine, I enjoy it and learn about the internals. SystemD works OK, I don't like its philosophy or the whole binary logs thing, but I quite like the service files metaphor.
The last time I got annoyed enough to change anything was Gnome 2->3 being forced by an update on debian testing, which is why I now run Xfce on any given linux box. I haven't yet gone to Wayland.
Maybe I'm just easy. Or maybe it's all the time I spent switching between Linux/Windows/HPUX/AIX/Solaris/whatever in the 00s. I just look for how I can get on with my day and then ... get on with my day.
I have an M1 Max like the author of this piece and recently upgraded. It's fine.
I don't like the look of it much and the drag targets are annoying but other than that it's been completely normal.
Like, things all work pretty well at first. And then god only knows what happens as config and preference files get into weird states, and temp files accumulate and never get deleted, and cache files get stuck with old info and refuse to update, and god only knows.
So people with relatively new installations have a pretty good time, while people who have migrated their data across three MacBooks over ten years are encountering problems left and right.
I reinstalled Sequoia fresh last year because some mystery process would slowly consume 50GB of disk space over the course of every two weeks, no disk utility could locate any file responsible, but restarting reset it. But with the fresh reinstall, everything started working fine again. It's annoying. Then I upgraded to Tahoe and zero problems. But I'm sure they'll gradually start appearing over the next year or two.
Yes, things like small bugs and abnormal user experiences accumulate and over time the OS and other apps become inconsistent.
As heavy users who are generally by profession spend a lot more time with a Mac, they tend to experience more issues, and things that used to work for decades start to crumble. It all works if you’re acting like working on glass pieces, but that’s not what computers are made for.
You’re supposed to use it extensively and get more efficient over time without a glassy UI and other broken systems pulling you down at every turn.
It’s not about using a system for 10 minutes to visit a website with Chrome, but instead spending days programming things, having a normal life, and still having the very simple file discovery features working.
There’s no reason for a computer to be this choppy and slow (in things like context switching etc.) unless something else is going on in the background.
The worst macOS releases I remember were in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Back then, I often had to spend a day or two after each release fixing things the update had broken. At some point, I was using Ubuntu VMs on desktop extensively, as it felt more stable and polished for some kinds of work than macOS.
I almost always skip the .0 and .1 versions. In my experience, it's better to wait for a few months after a major release of any software and let early adopters deal with the issues.
That's like asking whether Jackson Pollock or Thomas Kinkade is the better artist. There is no objective measure for it. Some people will have a strong preference, others won't have a preference at all. The designers who made the changes in Tahoe clearly thought the changes are improvements. A lot of macOS users disagree, but some macOS users don't have a preference.
One of my favorites is in Apple Music, where the transport controls and song-title display has been moved from the top of the window down into the content-browser or song-list area... where it's "transparent" and overlaid on other text or album art.
In Mail, the "get new mail" button has been REMOVED from the toolbar. WTF? WHY? So when you're awaiting the ever-more-widespread 2FA from something you just logged into, you get to dig through a menu to hurry up retrieval or re-add the button to the toolbar (which casual users are not going to know how to do).
The utter stupidity of these flailing, desperate changes should concern every computer user. Microsoft is lost, and Windows a clinic on dereliction, design incompetence, and hostility toward users. That leaves Mac OS as the only tolerable consumer computing platform... and it has taken a profound turn for the worse with Tahoe.
And all for nothing. Apple's blunders here don't make sense from any perspective.
Nor should they have to, given that mail retrieval is something that everyone can logically be expected to do if they're told they were just sent a message.
I wonder if there’s an issue with older M-series chips? I would image development is done on the latest and greatest, and maybe they’ve unintentionally missed something in the older architectures?
Is the UI great? Eh. But having to work with Windows in my day job, maybe I’m more patient with my Mac?
In the past I had problems with network attached Time Machine destinations, but now I have zero trust even in the “native” USB-based method.
Another funny thing is that Mac’s built in diagnostic mode, after running for good 20 minutes, proclaimed there were no issues with the system. Even though it was clearly failing in the graphics department, even when booting into an installer usb drive (or even a Linux live mode).
Think my favourite was a conceptual flaw. The lightning strike. You need a completely offline backup or you don't have a backup.
Edit: using ChronoSync and two external (hard) disks, rotated once a month off site at the moment. That has a nice fat VERIFY button on it.
I have been writing on/about and using Macs for 25 years, have had a bunch of semi-catastrophic failures with Tahoe (https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2026/02/18/1230) and Time Machine (https://taoofmac.com/space/til/2026/02/01/1630), and I have also been running Fedora daily for four or five years.
Were it not for Apple Silicon, I would probably be running Linux only today. But after Tahoe, I am very, _very_ motivated to accelerate my transition. And, ironically, I can make GNOME look and feel more like what a Mac should feel like than what Tahoe does.
But like I wrote the other day (https://taoofmac.com/space/links/2026/02/26/0806):
> The most likely [outcome] is that they will simply carry on without acknowledging any of it publicly and discreetly patch the most critical issues, because they are still making tons of cash on hardware and services and software quality really hasn’t been a priority in half a decade.
For one, my network samba shares stay connected and mounted through restarts. I could never make this work reliably on macOS.
File explorer is good. Finder always felt clunky and awkward to use. In addition, certain class of software exists for windows and not for macOS. Like FilePilot, Anything, MusicBee, Foobar2000 (Mac version of the latter is not the same as the windows version).
The biggest issue so far for me is keyboard shortcuts for text editing. Cmd-based movements are great and I have very deep muscle memory by now. I could not find a reliable way to recreate this on windows (I can make the cursor movement work, but some selections don’t work the same).
It’s wild to me that Apple has allowed SMB on MacOS to be so broken/slow and poorly implemented for so long. It’s been this way for over a DECADE.
I have friends who work at production studios who complain about network storage and MacOS all the time given any modern video workflow involves a NAS.
You would think a company that halos creative workers in all its ads would care about this. But they happily ignore since “SMB that works” is not a feature that will get much mainstream attention in a flashy keynote (that nobody watches anymore anyways).
Is 1100+ MB/sec read and write (single 10 GbE interface) slow?
But in a long time I haven't really enjoyed using the mac and I use other systems instead. They got rid of subpixel rendering and now text is blurry on my monitors. The interactions are much more of a chore. Features were removed from Preview and other apps that were better before. I quit using XCode for a few years and couldn't recognize it when I came back. So I use it maybe every 3-4 weeks now. I have no interest in buying another one.
I just don't know why they seem to be going out of their way to make the system unfriendly to existing users.
I loved Apple IIs at schools and libraries as a young child, fell in love with my Mac IIsi at home at the age of 7. Later, at 13, I had a Macintosh-evangelizing web site and mailing list that Guy Kawasaki (Apple's lead evangelist) even subscribed to.
I've been a primary Mac user through the 68k, PowerPC, Intel, and Apple Silicon days, from System 6.0.7 through today. Got an original iPhone and iPad, have upgraded my iPhone every few years since.
The technofeudalism, bugginess, and UI crappiness has me done and looking for the exits, to say nothing of the embrace of Trump. My next laptop won't be a Mac, and my next phone won't be an iPhone.
Now I'm barely using it as every few months I'm prompted to just delete the backup and start fresh because something corrupted.
I'm not one of these 'it hasn't happened to me, ergo it's impossible people'. I completely think that many of the design elements of Tahoe are a horrendous regression versus even Sequoia, but I think asserting that Time Machine is completely broken in the shipping version of macOS is a bold statement that deserves a bit of pushback, even among the fire raging in a lot of other places in macOS!
To be clear, I'm not saying it's Tahoe related, it has been there for many years.
Tons of people complain about this. I suspect it's some subtle bug with sparse bundles and SMB.
I don’t know what these engineers are doing at Apple, but it surely isn’t making the ecosystem better, they’re just chasing hypes and shinny useless UI changes.
This is what tells me I'm completely misaligned with Apple's vision of the future.
Why would I want an OS that aspires to prevent me from running perfectly good software that runs very well??? And at a time when even smartphones are starting to run x86 software well!
That's literally the opposite of what I want from a computer. If I have to choose between losing Mac software vs losing x86 software it is much easier to leave Mac software behind.
Like, why. Why would you need to change the printer system? It works.. has worked for a very long time, there's no reasonable need to change it.
I have an old (~10 years old) printer that Cannon stopped supplying updated macOS drivers for several years ago. The installer for the drivers failed so I had to extract the files from the package and install them manually. In the end only the network drivers work, the USB drivers are kexts which won't run.
What they did to Watch is much worse than what they did to iPhone and Mac
Apple are so stubborn and persistent in the way they choose directions. I realized I'd rather move on than be stuck with that mess for years. It's wild.
I still use macOS but I'm steadily finding ways off. Weird times. I've been deeply embedded in the apple platform for over 25 years.
I think I sensed things were meaningfully changing around 2020 (I can't recall exactly), but my sense of the ongoing decline is way more rapid than I anticipated back then. Maybe it started and gained momentum earlier than I realized.
I also held out for as long as possible using Safari, but I had to switch to Firefox. Every once in a while I forget the reason I switched and try to switch back and then get reminded. I'm currently in a "I can't remember the reason, but I'm too lazy to go find out" phase. I'm also one of those weirdos that liked the Safari compact tabs and I'm sad they removed it.
Every time they fuck something I move the workload over to Linux, not out of enthusiasm or any ideological purity but because I need to do some damn work. Add in the current geopolitical shit show, rising surveillance culture and the constant push for MRR and the whole "ecosystem" idea of computing and cloud becomes quite distasteful and risky.
A monumental moment recently was Reminders which has a horrible bug in it since Tahoe where you are entering several tasks in the scheduled view and you hit enter and carry on typing and it doesn't register the enter until several keypresses later, splitting the last word you typed between two tasks. This is a very very minor but utterly annoying thing which has broken my workflow. I was so fucked off with this happening every day I pulled a sheet of paper out of my printer and just wrote everything on that. And I've been doing that for 4 months now. Reminders is dead. I forget things like I did before, but I get over that.
One day I'll wake up and not use the Mac. The iPad and Apple Watch are already gone.
I have been experiencing this type of bug since forever when renaming files. Enter (to switch to renaming mode), start typing, first 1-3 letters are missing.
Here's my vector reproduction of the logo for MacAddict's and Guy Kawasaki's "EvangeList", circa 1997 :
Personally my guess is the core of the problem is their contempt for the users. The willingness to act directly against the best interest of the users, as this article points out so well, is bewildering. You just have to wonder that a company so large, with so much money and so many resources can be so utterly dysfunctional.
The iPhone, the iPod, the early Macs all demonstrated a profound understanding and care for users. And now? Contempt.
Oh well.
Other than the dumbing down of the UI and that kind of stuff, Tahoe seems to run fine. Safari seems to have more bugs than usual, though.
My workstation is pinned firmly to sequoia right now and will be until it's untenable or they undo their new UI design direction, which is, as you pointed out, ghastly.
We're in a way worse position now as they rushed out all the comically poor UI updates (Why do I still have 6 different border radiuses, and about 40 different icon packs being used on the default damn applications?) and the half baked AI crap that I've yet to see anyone use.
It might be nice for someone to crowd source a reasonable list of features they need to improve or document. Could get traction.
Btw isn't Rosetta going to be left but only for gaming and containerisation?
Is this with or without feedback that backing up wasn’t successful?
Yes, 28 years later and it’s still awful.
The M2 and M5 minis I have are the nicest drink coasters I've ever owned.
I have unresolved radars old enough to drive, go to war, or even vote at this point. They used to blame Intel's TB controllers. Guess what? They make their own now and the same fucking issues persist! Enjoy the kernel panics
They got bored of computing. Writing was on the wall when they started producing movies because Hollywood people are cooler than nerds and hey why earn a giant cash pile if not for some execs to have fun with it.
This is a company which hasn't done anything meaningful to innovate since Steve Jobs died.
Yeah I have all Apple gear. It's fine. Whatever. Nicest commodity on the block. But they could have done so much more in the last 15 years.
Some tiny bit of input from the mouse, which I'm possibly not holding quite perfectly still post-click, perhaps? I can only assume so. The odd thing about it, though: none of my laptop Macs had this problem, even though I am using the same keyboard, the same mouse, and the same USB hub. Something must be different, somewhere. I wonder what.
Hint: This is what happens when you commit to joining any single company's ecosystem. No matter if it's Apple, Microsoft, Google, Commodore, or frickin' IBM. At some point, the beancounters are going to smother what drew you to them in the first place, and find ways to nickel-and-dime you whilst flipping the table on you UX-wise hoping to tap some rich vein of unconverted users to continue the illusion of quarterly growth.
When yours is the only computer in the meeting that can't load the graphics network share, and you're the graphics expert, your boss will be calling IT and sternly asking why. He/she will learn that the MacOS has known issues with basic file sharing in business networks, among other annoying problems that you keep contacting about, and that Apple will never fix. Your boss will discover that IT recommended that you use a Windows machine, and provided you with viable workflows that meet or exceed all of the needs for your work responsibilities. And that other users don't have these issues when following their guidance. But, you opted for a Mac despite all of that.
Your boss will sigh. They will carry that sigh into how they perceive you. They will bring up how annoying your situation is every time they talk with IT.
I've heard this exact conversation or many other similar conversations 100s of times in my career. I've heard your boss sigh.
Do yourself a favor. If you aren't very technical, don't damage your career over something stupid like which OS you're using. It's the wrong hill to die on.
An IT team that treats Mac users this way today is just a bad IT team.
They are being friendly, and objective. Their job is to fix problems so that employees can be productive. It's not to lie for them, or to them. It's Apple's marketing team who has that job. You'll notice they don't do much in the way of advertising to IT directors and business decision makers. Their focus is college kids, specifically graphic designers and iOS app developers. It's definitely not businesses.
IBM? These are software issues. IBM doesn't make desktop operating systems for end users. Do you mean Microsoft? Apple never was and still isn't the Microsoft of business OS. I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.
If familiar with Apple's history, the IBM example was deliberately chosen. Once upon a time one would have seen an army of IBM desktops in the enterprise, much like the MacBook today...
> https://osxdaily.com/2011/12/30/young-steve-jobs-gives-ibm-t...
> If things were as close to as bad as you describe this simply wouldn't be the case.
Selling stuff means you have good marketing, not good products. Microsoft isn't better than Apple because they sell more software, right?
So, I don't follow your logic on that point at all. I have 20% of my current employee base running Mac OS. Why would that imply that they are a good career choice for the end user to make in a desktop OS? It implies they are the 1 in 5 who will be left out of the discussion and then complain that their computer wasn't working.
That 20% accounts for much more than their fair share of help desk interactions. And their boss still sighs when they come up in conversation. Why would you advise anyone to shoot themselves in the foot like that?
And more importantly, how dare you judge my IT department (friendly joking tone here)? But seriously, do you have a solution to make Apple's Samba implementation work?
That's kind of a critical component for business if you're going to say that Apple is so good for business like IBM/Microsoft. Wouldn't you say?
I'm not responding to the Samba critique because millions of people share files at work between virtually any OS and Macs, every day, just fine. Would I like Apple's Samba implementation to be better? Sure.
There are many studies that prove the opposite of your point, including one from IBM, and find the modern Mac significantly cheaper to support than Windows machines in business environments with less helpdesk tickets to boot:
https://www.jamf.com/resources/press-releases/ibm-announces-...
Here's more recent research to the contrary.
https://prowessconsulting.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/PCs...
I don't go by any of this stuff, though. It's all marketing. I have my own data and experience to work with. And I've given some hard to debate examples where it's a problem for one's career, and it's not one their IT department, or whomever I'm talking to here can help them with.
> https://www.ciodive.com/news/Cisco-tests-Apple-MacBook-vs-PC...
The usual suspects like Gartner and Forester routinely run studies on this question too.
Big deployment in that article. I would guess we can find similar size deployments from Microsoft to the contrary. Again, it's all marketing. I wouldn't make decisions based on that. You should be looking at your data as an organization and making decisions based on the entirety of your infrastructure.
And the same goes for individual employees. If you work in a company where most people are on Macs, where you're not the odd duck with problems, maybe it's a smarter move for you.
But most people aren't at those companies. And for those people, being the odd duck with problems that can't get to the file share, or the guy with slower access to files than the coworkers you're competing with, might be the difference between "That guy always nails it. What's his name?" and "Omg, this dude always has problems sharing files. Just go up and present it for him. This is embarrassing. In front of clients? Next time John should present."
Trust me, you would rather be John in that situation. And as a non-technical user, you're likely going to find yourself in made for Windows presentation situations more often. There are simply more of them.
Mac OS X Server is discontinued. Mac is just not for business, and Apple agrees, it seems. Unless of course your business is entirely cloud operated. That might be okay if your company is so big that you get Apple products and theirs or someone's cloud offerings for nearly free. But it's not practical for most companies of any size. Especially when you consider the delays caused by opening large files over the internet.
Non-technical Apple users think Mac is better for graphics. That's Apple's marketing. We're talking about large files.
Again, tell me about Samba. How do you call a machine with major problems interacting with a business network, a business computer?
(Should I answer that question? You blame the IT team, and say it's a business computer based on the sales data. It's all very illogical.)
>millions of people share files at work between virtually any OS and Macs
Right. Using cloud solutions. That's not practical in many applications, especially where medium and large businesses are concerned. You're going to make them download large files from the cloud every time they want to open them while their Windows counterparts are streaming those same files over a 10G fiber drop to the server?
Which one makes more sense here? One of these users is getting promoted. It's not the guy working the slowest, usually.
Anyway, the request to make Samba work comes from the users. I didn't go looking for a problem to solve, right? I prefer it when my phone doesn't ring, my pay being fixed and all.
For at least 10 years ...
For several years, ...
For a few months...
For several years, ...
For a year or so, ...
For several years, ...
macOS/iOS 26 are bad enough that I've begun switching to Linux. I preordered a Clicks Communicator and Pebble Round 2. Switching from a Macbook Pro M4 to an Asus ROG Flow Z13 with Debian.
macOS 26.3 updated clang and broke my emscripten workflow.
I tried to unrar a file but the version of unrar provided in homebrew is deprecated because it's no longer signed/blessed. I ended up SFTPing the file to a Linux box, extracting, and bringing it back.
My son wanted to try a Java minecraft app on his iPhone, but it required insane workarounds to enable JIT to get acceptable performance. This isn't a technical limitation, it's put in place specifically to protect Apple's walled garden, and their precious services revenue.
Despite the thousands of dollars spent on these devices, I don't feel like we own them. We can't run code without the platform owner's permission. We are at the mercy of the platform owner, that has been making increasingly worse decisions.
I'm really enjoying trying the available alternatives. My hope is that enough of us get fed up, and develop a thriving ecosystem in the open source world. I'll certainly be contributing back the things I build.
Basic keyboard shortcuts are still broke with the Wayland migration. e.g. Copyq has this janky workaround for a shortcut to register with the xdg-portal (that works until reboot, then stops), Warp terminal claims there is no support, Flameshot was impossible to configure, have to use the built in Gnome shortcut tool now. The whole ecosystem got wrecked. I have been so irritated by this that I've been considering switching TO the mac ecosystem, BUT this thread is good on my eyes and makes me disinterested now.
I don't have any of the problems mentioned by you or sibling comments, full stop.
Up until about a year ago, audio was janky as hell, but then as part of the great de-Poettering, they switched from PulseAudio to PipeWire. I've had zero issues since then.
Copy paste works. Login works. X11 runs at native panel speed (144Hz) with bug-for-bug parity with windows 3d acceleration, but open source (AMD drivers). XScreenSaver works (and can lock the screen). I can't comment on any of the stuff you mention in the second paragraph. I assume it's a bunch of broken Wayland workarounds?
Anyway, instead of switching to Mac, just switch to a stable distribution. Devuan is Debian minus systemd, so essentially everything works out of the box. Even crap that requires systemd usually works, since they install stubs. LLMs like Claude will happily admin it once you tell it that which init system to target.
Devuan uses elogind, which is a fork of logind that doesn't require systemd. I haven't noticed any problems with it.
A rube-goldberg version of SSH that somehow depends on many things that should be totally unrelated to SSH. Because ofc Poettering needing to mess with everything does need to have systemd notifications available from SSH.
This excuse allows to link many libs and pretend the backdoor attempts are unrelated to systemd, like the liblzma one.
Not of course it's an excuse that doesn't run very far seen the following undisputable fact: the XZ backdoor only affect systemd-enabled SSH. Ouch. Facts do hurt.
I cannot wait for the day a good hypervisor comes out for Linux that runs perfectly on a systemd-less Linux distro, like Devuan (I already used Devuan, but not as an hypervisor).
Basically "Proxmox but systemd-free". I know I've got the FreeBSD+bhyve option too. And at long last I'll be systemd-free again.
After a while, I just lost track. Happily, I don't have to deal with any of that stuff these days.
I'd expect devuan to be a decent hypervisor host, but haven't tried. There's also SmartOS (a few forks away from being Solaris), which looks like it had a release this year. It includes native ZFS.
Honestly, at this point, I'm looking at devuan as the last stop before I jump on the FreeBSD train. It looks like they let you choose between X11 or Wayland, at least for now. I got Steam to work in a FreeBSD VM, but it face-planted because the VM host didn't support any sort of 3d acceleration.
Hopefully enough users will revolt to keep X11, systemd-free Linux viable, but I wonder if that particular niche (which still works great out of the box) is going to end up less popular than the BSDs.
It really makes me miss Classic Mac OS 9. I used it from 7.5.1 to 9.2.2. I remember being so excited about Mac OS X when the Public Beta came out that I switched immediately. It really sucked and I went back immediately. But eventually Mac OS X got better and I switched to it, and never looked back.
Now I am looking back and remembering everything I lost. A computer that was so simple and so predictable. It didn't change behind my back all the time. It never shoved upgrades down my throat. It just worked!
This is what cachyOS + KDE is giving me at the moment. Ok, so it's not totally simple and there are A LOT of updates. But it's by and large predictable. I never had a 1980-90s Mac, but I had an Apple IIe and an Amiga 500. While cachyOS is so much more powerful it doesn't abuse that power like Windows and OSX with so many background processes and telemetry. I have a Mac laptop and I dual boot my PC with Windows + Linux. I don't have hate OSX but CachyOS + KDE is by far my favourite as it's customisable to the extent I want and it just gets out of my way. Highly recommend it if that wasn't obvious!
It's like flicking a lightswitch or reaching into a drawer and grabbing a spoon without looking. Everything is always right where you left it. Double-click a folder and the window opens in exactly the same state that you left it when it was last closed. All the icons are arranged in the same way, with the same label colours you gave them, and each of the folders inside that folder open the same way as well. One folder might open in list view sorted by Date Modified while another opens in icon view with the exact arrangement you decided on, all according to the way you left them.
All of those folders open their windows in the exact same position, size, and shape they had when you closed them. This lets you quickly drill down through layers of nested folders, moving your mouse to the next one before your eyes can even register it on screen.
The effect of this extreme level of persistence is that you develop muscle memory for the mouse. No other operating system environment I have ever used works like this, or at least this pervasively (modern macOS still has this for the menu bar). Everyone else just gives up and relegates the muscle-memory control to the keyboard only. This is a huge tragedy! A Classic Mac OS power user works with one hand on the mouse, one hand on the keyboard, and uses muscle memory with both to fly around the UI and work very efficiently. This is especially valuable when you're working in software that needs the mouse anyway, such as art or design software.
Toshy still works to give me Mac keyboard shortcuts I might never let go of, but I still haven't figured out the keyboard shortcut to switch between open instances of the same program which drives me insane!
Logiops + Plasma's multi desktop support has given me something very similar to the multi desktop experience I had before, and the pager in the taskbar is a big improvement.
The tiling in Plasma needs work. I initially loved it until I released that when I arranged the tiles differently on one desktop, it changed them on the others... Hopefully that gets better.
Is it? Do you have any examples?
Yes, there were and are problems, but far, far less than before and not much more than on X11, just different ones.
1. switching between different browser tabs has a sub-second delay(est 200ms) 2. a tab in system settings menu takes 200ms to load 3. maximizing a video doesn't always work(sometimes it leaves a big white space on top) 4. double tabbing a keyboard key often triggers zooming into the browser page
I couldn't believe these issues haven't been fixed after 3 subversions.
I was 100% Apple: Mac Mini on the desktop, Macbook Air laptop, iPhone, and two iPads.
Then came Tahoe.
I hated it so badly and it wouldn't let me change the things I hated.
I noticed a subtle sneer as I worked, having to use this stupid computer that wouldn't let me adjust it to my liking anymore.
Then I noticed I wasn't working as much as I used to because I just viscerally hated having to work in that Tahoe environment.
At first I did the thing of erasing the entire computer and doing a USB install just go back to the previous.
But then like you said: “I don't feel like we own them.” I didn't trust Apple to not keep making it worse.
So I switched. Got a Linux desktop, and a Framework laptop. Sooooo nice!! Snappy-fast Linux just the way I want it.
While I was at it, got my first Android phone and installed GrapheneOS on Google Pixel. Sooooo nice! So quiet, doing only what I want.
Even got my first Android tablet to replace the iPad. (OnePlus Pad 3.) It's great too. I'm loving the whole Android ecosystem, when made nerdy like Linux.
So yeah I'm 100% off Apple now and will never go back.
That's how bad Tahoe is.
Even GrapheneOS on an Android phone, which I’d heard was hard to install, was dead easy and so worth it.
For Mac to Linux, you can just rsync your /Users/{me} to /home/{me} and enjoy updating some old habits.
Source:
Apple marketers are just going to think that in another year you’re going to get annoyed by some Linux thing (yes, there will be something annoying) and buy a brand new $2000+ Mac.
These kind of posts get a lot of upvotes, but they do nothing to change corporate behavior.
What leads you to believe that anything he mentioned is temporary?
I can't point at a bug that I've seen addressed in subsequent OS releases.
Seizure-inducing HDMI flickering from Night Shift. Finder Trash not supporting put-back _sometimes_. Printers becoming permanently "paused" sporadically, or worse, very consistently. Mouse lag/stuttering because you used "the wrong USB port." Apple photos libraries corrupting themselves with no recovery paths.
It would be strictly better to just not have the forum, then shouting sorrows into the void would feel more solitary.
I basically don’t care anymore. Timeline consistently pinkscreens my laptop.
I just don’t give a f anymore. I barely run any Apple software on my Mac.
The only reason I stop use it, is because I have not spent the energy into researching:
- performant + long battery laptop with a good build quality
- disk encryption + while on X attempts
- good trackpad
The rest, the os, the shortcuts, I can change or adapt.
Not once have I hit an issue that wasn't documented and left unresolved on Apple's for over 3 years.
The fine article made the same comparison.
Well, they should. I've been on Mac since System 6.0.7. I've had a Mac Clone. I've been mocked by more Windows users for "using a toy computer" than I can remember. I remember (and briefly used) BeOS. I remember The Mac Performa-series fiasco. The Copland failure. Steve's return. The launch of OS X.
In all those years, I have NEVER witnessed such widespread dissatisfaction among long-time, loyal users, heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem. Users so frustrated with Apple's moronic decisions and the design of the OS that they are literally paying money to abandon it. I'm one of them. The frustration isn't rooted in nostalgia or resistance to change. It's the accumulation of what feels like contemptuous decision-making.
If that doesn't set off alarm bells in Cupertino, I guess it's just one more proof that parting ways is indeed the right call.
I was on my way out the door before the Apple Silicon launch. They managed to briefly bring me back in, but the software is only getting worse. It's a shame too, because I do believe Apple has the best hardware.
We all predict the future, consciously or not. We invest our time and effort into a system that we think has a good future.
Tahoe made me lose trust in Apple's software, and see its trajectory as a bad one that I didn't want to invest any more time into.
Then came Apple Silicon. And at least in my eyes, Apple hardware is the best it's been in a really long time.
There are some definite trainwrecks in the current state of Liquid Glass (especially on the Mac), and there have been other dubious choices and mounting bugs made over the last few years. But I've used both Windows 11 and a recent Linux distribution (Fedora, via Asahi Linux, running KDE Plasma), and while I like the latter it's just not enough to make me give up what I like on the Mac in terms of Mac-only applications and little life-bettering affordances I've internalized over the years I've been here. Yes, if the trajectory they're on now in software continues, I'll have to re-evaluate that -- but their hardware took a real turn for the better after Jony Ive and some of his deputies left. Alan Dye and some of his deputies left earlier this year, and I'm not going to count the new team out before giving them a chance to prove themselves.
They do eventually listen to their customers. Let's hope it doesn't take as long for these changes to get rolled back.
I'm kinda stuck with Mac at work. I don't mind it, but I run Linux on all my personal computers and find that is way better.
But I wonder if they have the ability to execute... anything, anymore. It's starting to look a little like Windows, which in a totally shameless and burlesque fashion has 3 or 4 design paradigms at the same time, jumbled together in a big stew.
We've had this for decades with Windows, and internal leaks confirming that it's all to do with turf wars between departmental heads.
As you say, it's an indication that Apple are going down the same road, and are unable to actually execute a vision anymore.
Just to put cards on the table, the problem Apple has is disillusionment. They've managed to disabuse people of the notion that Apple designs quality software that is useful in their lives.
People who have lost faith in Apple won't regain their faith even if Apple fixes all the Liquid Glass problems in six months. And that is not something that will happen. On top of that, people are anticipating AI features and a touch-optimized interface.
It's why Google Trends shows larger-than-ever numbers of people having iPhone battery issues, performance issues, and searching for how to switch to Android. "Macos to Linux" peaked after Tahoe, at 3x higher than its pre-LG peak, for example.
I gave up on Apple twelve years ago and I can't imagine ever buying another Mac.
I mean, all problems are temporary, time is money etc. etc. And there are signs that suggest that some of these problems (namely freedom to run your own software) are not going to get resolved soon. Is there something deeper in your thought that I missed?
> These kind of posts get a lot of upvotes, but they do nothing to change corporate behavior.
I don't understand, we are on a discussion forum. Of course writing comments here does not influence what Apple does, that's not what HN is for, I think (I hope) that everyone already assumes that. Why do you feel the need to point that out?